When and how cinemas plan to reopen: face masks, health scanners and Christopher Nolan’s Tenet

A project is underway to lure audiences back to the screen. But will they want to come, asks Tim Robey

When and how cinemas plan to reopen: face masks, health scanners and Christopher Nolan’s Tenet
For the cinema industry, all eyes are on July 17, when Christopher Nolan’s 'Tenet' is due to open Credit: Getty

 July 17. It might be hard, under lockdown, to attach any special significance to a date over two months away, with so many uncertainties strewn in our path between now and then. But for the cinema industry, all eyes are on that red-letter Friday. It’s when Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, the $205 million (£165 million) high-concept blockbuster that’s one of the year’s most hyped attractions, is still scheduled for global release. 

The list of other mainstream films that have moved out of the way of coronavirus is long and costly. The postponement club includes Disney’s Mulan and the Bond film No Time to Die, but Warner Bros and Nolan are not budging on their Tenet release plans, meaning that it stands, practically on its own, as a stake in the sand. It’s a test case for when cinemas hope to be back in business.

“That’s certainly our expectation right now,” says Tim Richards, the founder and CEO of the Vue cinema chain, which operates in 10 countries, nine of them in Europe. “It will start a concerted effort with the studios to drive audiences into our cinemas again. When it’s released, there’s not going to be much else around it, so I imagine it’s going to get a huge amount of screen time. It’s looking like it could be a very good move for Warner Bros to do it.”

Well before cinemas get any official go-ahead, they’ve been plotting out the minutiae of how to reopen their doors. If distancing measures remain in place, seat allocations when booking online will have to reflect these, and so will queuing protocols and entry/exit procedures, which will need to be controlled to prevent bottlenecks. Contactless payments and paperless ticketing will be standard, along with deep cleaning in the auditoria, and potentially face masks for employees and visitors alike.

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Richards’s confidence is based on previous experience. “We have the benefit of an Asian operation in Taiwan,” he explains, “and we operated through the SARS epidemic in 2002-4. We learnt a lot, which we’re using today for our pre-opening and our operating protocols.”

Currently being deployed in Taiwan – whose Vue cinemas have not closed – are prototypes for temperature checks as customers pass through the foyers, looking much like airport security scanners. These could well be fitted in the UK, too. The size of the Vue operation, and record-breaking growth in last year’s box office, has enabled the company to see out this fallow period without losing a single one of its 9,000 employees – 5,000 in the UK alone.

Every cinema site across the country, large and small, has to judge how distancing requirements will affect the user experience.

Trolls World Tour, which Universal fast-tracked to online earlier this year
Trolls World Tour, which Universal fast-tracked to online earlier this year Credit: DreamWorks Animation LLC

“All these considerations about the safety of our staff and customers need to be balanced with making sure people still have an enjoyable time,” says Clare Binns, joint managing director of the 26-strong Picturehouse chain. 

And another concern pops up when I speak to Binns and everyone else I interview among UK exhibitors – “When we reopen, will it be worth it?” That’s a triple-headed premise: worth it for filmgoers, cinemas and studios.

Tenet, a major release that needs maximum exposure, might be the first film on the calendar to provide an answer, but there’s a lot of uncertainty. “Will we be able to deliver the box office?” queries Binns. “We all need to be confident that we can deliver for the business in the long term.”

John David Washington in Christopher Nolan's forthcoming Tenet
John David Washington in Christopher Nolan's forthcoming Tenet Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon/Warners

For smaller players it could be a make-or-break moment. Take Newcastle’s Tyneside Cinema, a local institution housing four screens on its art deco, Grade-II listed premises. Though 100 out of the cinema’s 130 staff have been furloughed since March, it still costs £40,000 per month to keep the Tyneside afloat.

The Tyneside is committed to independent films, yet a Tenet – or something like Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, which has been postponed till September – is the kind of prestige blockbuster which can provide half their box office in a given month. The worst-case scenario isn’t staying closed, says Andrew Simpson, Tyneside’s director of film programming, but “it’s being allowed to open, the furlough ending at the same time, and audiences not showing up. We’re open, it’s dead, and there’s no government support.” Fundraising raised £50,000, a testament to how valued the Tyneside is, but Simpson thinks that a second spike could send the company under.

The currently 'dark' Odeon Leicester Square in central London
The currently 'dark' Odeon Leicester Square in central London

Each decision to postpone the big releases has essentially been a vote for cinema to resume in due course. But one company broke ranks. Universal’s choice to fast-track Trolls World Tour to a video-on-demand streaming release for families under lockdown was an unprecedented defection, cutting cinemas out of the equation. Doubling down on this, the studio’s CEO, Jeff Shell, said last week that even after cinemas reopen, they would continue releasing films in both formats.

Cinema chains such as Odeon, Cineworld and AMC countered this move with a refusal to show Universal’s films on their screens henceforth. This would mean that a money-spinning slate including Fast and Furious 9 and No Time to Die would be banned – unless some kind of agreement is reached about how to safeguard the ever-dwindling theatrical release “window” before films are let into our homes.

“I don’t think any exhibitor in the world is happy with what they did,” says Richards about Trolls, “but we understand why they did it. They had spent heavily on marketing the film, they had a retail deal in place, and suddenly there was not a single screen globally to play it.”

The hope is that the window will be fully reinstated on the other side of the crisis – and that the change of rules on eligibility for the Oscars, allowing films to qualify without a theatrical release, winds up being a 2020 one-off. There’s an undertow of optimism about the reinvigoration of the filmgoing experience.

“The one certainty,” says Richards, “is that when the quarantines are lifted, there’s going to be a pent-up demand for out-of-home entertainment like there never has been before. We’re social beings – we want to enjoy a collective social experience. And what better way?”

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